Configure Exadata storage cell mail notification

The Oracle Exadata database machine from Oracle gets a lot its performance not specifically from the compute nodes or the infiniband switches, one of the main game changers are the storage cells used within the Exadata. The primary way, for command line people, to interact with the storage cells if the “cell command line interface” or commonly called the CellCLI.

When you like to ensure you storage cell is informing you via mail notifications you can configure or alter the configuration of the storage cell email notification using the CellCLI command.

When doing changes to the configuration you do want to first know the current configuration of a storage cell. You can execute the following command to request the current configuration

CellCLI> list cell detail

For mail configuration you will primarily want to look at:

• smtpServer
• smtpFromAddr
• smtpFrom
• smtpToAddr
• notificationMethod

To test the current configuration you can have the storage cell send a test mail notification to see if the current configuration works like you expect. The VALIDATE MAIL operation sends a test message using the e-mail attributes configured for the cell. You can use the below CellCLI command for this:

CellCLI> ALTER CELL VALIDATE MAIL

If you want to change something you can use the “ALTER CELL” option from the CellCLI. As an example we use the below command to set all information for a full configuration to ensure that your Exadata storage cell will send you mail notifications. As you can see it will also send SNMP notifications however the full configuration for SNMP is not shown in this example.

CellCLI> ALTER CELL smtpServer='smtp0.seczone.internal.com',            -
                    smtpFromAddr='huntgroup@internal.com',         -
                    smtpFrom='Exadata-Huntgroup',                         -
                    notificationMethod='mail,snmp'